Can New York’s community gardens be a 15-minute city resource?

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The 15-minute city has become one of the most talked-about ideas in urban planning. The premise is simple: everything you need for daily life — work, groceries, green space, community — should be accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Paris has made it the organizing framework for its urban development strategy. Cities across the world are using it as a lens for thinking about what equitable urban infrastructure looks like. But when we say “everything,” what exactly do we mean?

Community gardens are one of the things I think belong on that list. They offer food production, green respite, social connection, and ecological function all in one. New York City, where I’ve done a lot of my research, has an extraordinary network of community gardens — over 500 by some counts — which makes it an ideal place to ask: are those gardens actually accessible to the people who need them most? And what would it look like to improve that access?

That’s the question that motivated a paper I published with Samuel Limerick, Dimitrios Gounaridis, Nevin Cohen, and Joshua Newell in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. We used scenario analysis to examine community garden access in NYC through the lens of 15-minute walkability — not just mapping where gardens are today, but modeling how access might change under different expansion scenarios.

The findings are what you’d probably expect, and that’s the frustrating part. Access to community gardens within a 15-minute walk is not equitably distributed. Neighborhoods with higher incomes and larger white populations tend to have better garden access. Lower-income communities and communities of color — the folks who arguably stand to benefit most from community green space and food production — are more often left out. This is a pattern we’ve seen across urban green infrastructure research, and community gardens are no exception.

What the scenario analysis adds is some optimism. We found that relatively modest expansions of the garden network — especially if those expansions were targeted at underserved, high-density neighborhoods — could meaningfully improve access for a large number of residents. You don’t need to build gardens everywhere to close most of the gap; you need to build the right gardens in the right places.

Of course, “just build gardens in underserved neighborhoods” glosses over a lot. Land in New York is expensive, contested, and constantly under development pressure. Community gardens have spent decades being built up and torn down, and the community land trust movement exists precisely because farmers and gardeners learned the hard way that informal occupation doesn’t last. Secure land tenure is a prerequisite for everything else — no amount of planning elegance matters if the garden gets displaced by condos five years later.

But what this work does is establish the benchmark. If cities are serious about the 15-minute city — and not just as a slogan — equitable garden access has to be part of the picture. We now have a way to measure how far any given city is from that benchmark, and a tool for evaluating whether proposed investments will actually move the needle.

Limerick, S., Hawes, J. K., Gounaridis, D., Cohen, N., & Newell, J. P. (2023). Community gardens and the 15-minute city: Scenario analysis of garden access in New York City. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 89, 128107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2023.128107

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